"April is the cruellest month." T.S. Eliot wrote that.
I mean. I think he did.
I mean. I really don't know much about poetry if that's what you're thinking. It could have been Dr. Seuss for all I know, I really don't pay attention to these sorts of things. Ask me about how to make a Black Russian or maybe how to hock a loogie 30 yards and maybe I'm your man. But poetry? That's for sissies.
I am not a sissy.
Anyway, I was walking with a friend of mine across the Lawn the other day admiring the blooming forsythia and couldn't help saying, "My, aren't the blossoms beautiful? I surely cannot wait until these magnolias start flowering."
He looked at me as though I had just hit a puppy with a Mack truck, hit reverse and jammed on the gas pedal.
"Dude, what are you, some kind of sissy?"
"Heavens, no!" I cried in protest. "I mean, hell naw, bro. What I meant to say was, Damn son: Check out those fine-looking honeys over there."
I guess I'm just really sick of winter and now we're lingering on the edge of springtime. One day we get warm weather and sunshine, and then we'll get four nights in a row with temperatures that feel like something straight out of January in Siberia. It seems that Eliot -- or Seuss, again, you'd have to ask someone who knows poetry -- had it right. April is a tease. A tormentor, a torturer, a puller of practical jokes. Everything about April says that the weather should be warm. Daylight Savings Time is back, the birds are chirping and flowers are pushing up everywhere.
And so I'll put on a short-sleeved shirt and flip flops, ready to bask in the glory of a Charlottesville spring day.
"I don't think so," says April to me. I open the door in the morning and find that it's pouring, frigid and windy.
The worst part is that since the cold weather has been hanging on, I can't torture friends in New England with forecast highs in Charlottesville. On Monday I'll talk to a friend at Holy Cross on the phone and casually say, "You know, it's about 97 degrees here right now. What's it like up in Worcester? Negative four? Shucks, that's really too bad."
April doesn't even seem to consider that she (definitely "she") is robbing me of valuable bragging rights. I try to fake the temperature here: "Yeah, well it's, uh-beautiful here today. Yup. Sun's shining. Everyone's in shorts."
But weather.com is just a click away on the Web, and thanks to Al Gore's stupid invention, my friends in Upstate New York, or Boston or Rhode Island know that in fact it's raining and miserable, and that I in fact am a sad, lonely, little sissy-boy.
My girlfriend Meghan in Philadelphia scoffs at my attempts to convince her of the superiority of springtime in the south. "Are you sure it's sunny and 105 in Charlottesville? It says here that it's 45 degrees and drizzling."
I start to sweat. She knows too much. "Really?" I say, my voice shaking. "There must be some kind of virus in the servers. Try hitting refresh. Because I'm looking outside right now and let me tell you there are some fine honeys lying out in front of my dorm in bikinis."
"Nope. It still says the same thing."
"Hmm, well that's the darndest thing. Look I'll let you go, I'm going to put on some sunscreen and go outside to get a tan."
"You're so pathetic," she says.
I hang up and the rain taps against my window.
Of course, it's not as though every day is grey and rainy. But I think that only makes it worse. The beautiful days make the rainy ones drearier. April is leading us on by a string, filling us with thoughts of summer and then dragging us down into dark desperate pits of wintry despair.
Maybe I just whine too much. Maybe I should just look at it from another angle. Rainy, disgusting, horrible days in April make beautiful days in May all the more enjoyable. There's so much to look forward to -- Foxfields, the end of class and the final weekends of another year at Mr. Jefferson's University. The blossoms will come and so will the warm weather. The dreary days of early April only lead to warmth, sunshine and summer.
"April might be the cruelest month, but it doth give birth to new days, warm nights and maketh the lingering sunlight of an August day such the sweeter for it."
I made up those last lines myself.
"My God, you're such a sissy," Meghan says.
Ah spring, season of love.
"Shantih shantih shantih"
A-J Aronstein can be reached at aronstein@cavalierdaily.com
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